‘The Idol’ Episode 3 Recap: Emote Control

“Satire requires a clarity of purpose and target lest it be mistaken for and contribute to that which it intends to criticize” —old internet proverb

“Silly me. I thought the Nazis lost the war. But here’s the exceedingly strange new movie ‘Starship Troopers’ commandeering 22 million American dollars in its first weekend and certain to make gobs more, while secretly whispering, ‘Sieg Heil!’” —Stephen Hunter, “Goostestepping at the Movies,” The Washington Post, November 11, 1997

Anyways, “Daybreak,” the third episode of writer-director Sam Levinson and co-creator/star Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye’s admitted (or alleged, if you’re feeling uncharitable) Verhoeven riff The Idol makes it clearer than ever that Tedros Tedros, Tesfaye’s domineering svengali, is a joke. He fires a man like a big tough guy while wearing black socks and Tevas. He berates the employee of a high-end clothing store with the least convincing threats to curbstomp a guy you’ve ever heard in your life. He grunts and groans while jerking off in public like something out of the MacGruber movie. He prepares for a confrontation with Jocelyn’s manager Chaim by unzipping his Paulie Walnuts tracksuit jacket to expose his chest. He is dismissed by Jocelyn’s other manager Destiny thusly: “My grandmother said you never trust a dude with a rat tail.” He pronounces carte blanche “cartay blanchay,” for crying out loud. Do you guys believe me that they wrote and acted this guy like this on purpose yet or what?

Despite a short running time (there’s around 44 minutes of action all told, if I’m counting right), though, Levinson’s script (pay your writers for making your existence possible, AMPTP) definitely gives the episode the feel of two shows in one. At the start, it’s a black comedy about Tedros sinking his hooks (and burying his tongue) ever deeper into Jocelyn, to her assistant Leia’s escalating dismay, all despite the fact that he’s a gigantic dork. While he and Joss do ridiculous call-me-daddy sex stuff in public all day, Chaim and Destiny try to figure out what the hell is going on with the guy, while fending off the increasingly panicked inquiries of Live Nation executive Finkelstein. (I’m slightly afraid to admit how hard I laughed at “I’m shitting more blood than a kid on Epstein’s island,” The Idol’s answer to Fight Club’s “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school.”) 

But their confrontation with Tedros leaves them actually kinda impressed by him, despite the reservations they give voice to afterwards. They blow past Leia, who’d called them in a blind panic about Tedros’s cult-leader hold over the household, while saying “I fucking love that guy. He’s amazing.” (My second-biggest laugh line of the night. Third place was the curbstomp routine.) In the interview where he claimed the Verhoeven influence, Tesfaye singled out actors Rachel Sennot, Hank Azaria, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph for the comedy chops they add to the equation, and it’s tough to argue with that here.

But in that same interview, he says “Not to give away too much but especially in Episode 3, we love to play with the comedy of it but then it’s like… don’t get too comfortable.” That is indeed how the episode plays out, with a second half much darker than the first. Pivoting off a suggestion by her frustrated creative director Xander that she use the cumshot photo circulating on the internet as the cover of her next album, Tedros — who’s been negging Jocelyn about her taste and judgement all episode long behind the jokes — browbeats her into divulging the ugly truth about her ostensibly beloved late mother: She brutally beat Joss with a hairbrush as a way to instill discipline, all the way through Joss’s adulthood success, until she finally got too sick to swing the brush anymore. 

This plays out largely in closeups on Tesfaye and Lily-Rose Depp, who I fear will never get the credit she deserves for the demanding work she’s been doing on this show. She carries the scene by letting Joss’s discomfort and resentment of Tedros, and finally her exhaustion with never telling the truth about her mother out loud, radiate from her lambent eyes, or through the expressive way her mouth shifts from too-smiley smile to zeroed-out flatline. Tesfaye cuts this physical performance in half for his part, controlling his face so as not to overtly display the sadistic, predatory glee he’s getting out of breaking Joss down like this; the dark mirth shows only in his eyes.

The episode ends with Tedros taking Jocelyn’s mother’s hairbrush and beating her with it himself, then performing an aftercare routine the next morning, complete with a languid bathtub-lounging shot straight out of pretty much every Adrian Lyne movie you’ve ever seen. For a moment the show lets you believe that maybe he’s going to ritualistically toss the brush into the fire, but no such luck. It’s a monumentally fucked-up sequence of course, culminating as it does in Joss’s well, that’s not a good sign closing line of “Thank you for taking care of me.” But it’s fucked up like a fox.

Sex in general and BDSM in particular can (and should!) be used to process your emotions and, yes, your traumas, but this is a safe practice only if both participants are going into it with eyes wide open and intentions declared. Joss may indeed have gotten genuine catharsis out of this roleplay, but because Tedros is who he is, that’s a pyrrhic victory. By compelling her participation in the painful ritual in front of their little circle of friends (except Leia, whom he recognized as a threat and had Izaak remove), he turns it into a way not to help her but to claim her, and to show this to all the others in the process.A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and Tedros knows just enough about this shit to use it to really mess Joss up.

But why is material that’s this much of a live wire present in the grunting-as-he-jerks-off, “cartay blanchay” show? You’ve gotta return to your Basic Instinct and your Body Double for the answer to that. The Idol is a sort of satire you don’t really see much that often, not even on a network as satire-heavy as HBO: the kind of satire that effectively imitates, and thus also functions as, that which it’s satirizing.

Succession played with the allure of extreme wealth as both a selling point and a plot point, but it’s not like it felt like Dynasty or Dallas at any point; it was satirizing these kinds of people, not those kinds of shows. Same with The White Lotus or The Righteous Gemstones. 

The Idol, by contrast? Well, you know how RoboCop and Starship Troopers lampoon action movies but are also incredibly kickass action movies? For that matter, you know how Twin Peaks’s initial run was both a weird parody of nighttime soaps while also being the best nighttime soap on television? The Idol is doing fucked-up sex shit even as it pastiches fucked-up sex shit. To put it in terms from the show itself, it’s Chaim saying “I fucking love that guy” one minute, and “I think our girl’s in trouble” the next.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.